#ARE CONTOUR LINES IN ART 2D HOW TO#

With this technique, you will spend 100% of your time looking at the object you’re drawing and 0% of your time looking at your paper. 2) Blind Contour Drawingīlind contour drawing is just that, a contour drawing that you make while “blind” or without looking at the paper. Pure contour drawing will help you practice the basic skills you may not have practiced for a long time. It’s amazing how our abilities to draw simple shapes can deteriorate when we’re so focused on shading and details ( source). Going back to basics may sound boring, but it’s so important. Without focusing on all of the details of what you’re trying to draw, pure contours will let you practice the basics and actually see objects differently, for the simple shapes that they are. You’ll rediscover the basic anatomy of the objects around you and how they’re all simply made out of a combination of lines. Spending some time with pure contour drawing will bring you back to the basics of your art and force you to see things in their simplest forms. We forget that our entire art journey started with the basics, with pure contour drawing. Some of us even leave the pencils behind and start exploring paints or watercolors. All the while, we’re still using the same technique of pure contour drawing.Īs artists, many of us move on from pure contours and want to start adding shading, and the textures that make our art look realistic. We use a combination of circles and squares to make stick figures we draw buildings and people that are way out of proportion to each other we draw everything in 2D with no dimension. We also start to learn how shapes come together to make objects.

#ARE CONTOUR LINES IN ART 2D HOW TO#

Overtime, we start to learn how to keep our hands steady as we draw. We try to reproduce shapes, struggle with making straight lines, and work hard to craft circles that don’t look like eggs. From the moment that we pick up a crayon, we’re trying to understand how to put our world onto paper. Remember that pure contour drawing is how most of us learn art in the first place. How Can Pure Contour Drawing Improve Your Art?Įven though pure contour drawing is simple, the benefits of it aren’t. You also wouldn’t draw the highlights and color variations. You wouldn’t draw the bruises, wormholes, or scratches.

For example, if you’re drawing an apple, you would draw the round shape and a stem. Pure contour drawing is the simplest form of contour drawing and only consists of the most basic outlines of the shapes you’re drawing. Let’s dive into what contour drawings are, how you can make the most of them, and why they’ll improve your art. In fact, contour drawing has a lot of benefits aside from being an easy art form to pick up. Considered one of the most basic types of drawing, contour drawing is what many of us learn first as artists.Īll of us make contour drawings all the time, but it’s easy to forget the meaning behind them and why they matter. Contour drawings have very little detail and only consist of lines. Contour drawing is one of the most common types of drawing and makes up a lot of the art that we create and enjoy.Ī contour drawing is an outline of a shape without any shading, texture, or tone. Little did we know that we were all budding contour artists. From the time we’re kids, we all grab crayons and start scribbling shapes.

Are contour lines in art 2d